What you advocate (a gated premium content community?) smells like the classic two-part tarriff. It's like the dichotomy between subscriber TV and broadcast TV. There ain't nothing about market equilibrium that has a tendency to narrow the divide. Two part tarriffs have proven easy and profitable to implement in a wide variety of industries. It's pretty much an Established Scientific Fact that value is subjective...price can't be far behind. I myself find the practice distasteful, but I'm a hopeless idealist. I find reality distasteful. :-)
My guess is that a closed network will evolve largely independent of the internet, with the latter even further degenerating into a cesspit of spam. The internet that amazed the heck out of me when I first encountered it in 1991 is child of subsidy. That it ain't never coming back is probably obvious to everyone. I was floored by the ability to read article after article written by ordinary people from every part of the world at nominal cost (which in my case was absorbed into my college tuition) in a medium in which advertising in any form was considered bad netiquette, except some private party ads quarantined in the misc.forsale hierarchy. You know what they say about if something seems too good to be true.
As for a revival of a remnant of Internet Classic, I suppose a movement like fidonet or pubwan might actually get beyond the planning stage, but with the massive consolidation of the ISP industry, that too would probably have to develop independently of the Internet, not within it.
What really disturbs me isn't the startling revelation that Bandwidth Isn't Free. It's the fact that the bulk of mainstream consumers just don't seem to get it when it comes to information issues. There are signs that more and more people are starting to, for example the C.A.S.P.I.A.N. organization. There are also signs that it may already be too late. Now the U.S. Government is mesmerized by the "magic" of data sharing and is publically proposing data sharing between federal agencies, between federal and state governments, and with foreign governments. And the public is eating it right up. The "purchasing power" of pretext is amazing in this country.
